Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructures support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, limitations in download bandwidth and device screen size give rise to challenges in viewing large images having high horizontal and vertical resolution (in pixels). Examples include digital pictures and fax attachments to an email, which typically can have resolutions in the 2000×2000 pixel range.
For wireless devices that support viewing of image attachments, this represents a large amount of information for downloading, requiring a large amount of bandwidth and associated cost thereof. Additionally, the user must wait for an extended period of time while the device is downloading the image.
Since mobile communication devices have limited screen real estate, the downloaded image must be resized on the device in order to be viewable. However, such a resizing operation requires a very large memory and CPU usage thereby affecting the performance of all other applications on the device for the duration of the resizing process.
Companies such as Mapquest® allow users to zoom in on a map from a web browser client such that the map regenrates with a higher amount of detail. This zoom feature is accomplished in a web client/server implementation using vector graphics, which is not applicable to viewing wireless image attachments.